On Thursday evening, in about 20 minutes, North Korea stole $6.3bn from Binance. That is more than 13 times the value of everything the country exported last year. By Elliptic’s count, it almost doubles everything Pyongyang is known to have stolen in crypto, and is “almost certainly the single largest known theft of any kind”.
Crypto was sold as the Wild West.
Crypto advocates spent years explaining that cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible, that if they’re “not your keys, [they’re] not your coins”. But that has always been overblown. As with stealing anything else, the main risk to stealing cryptocurrency has never been that the transaction might be reversed, it’s that you’re going to be arrested!
This doesn’t work against a state like North Korea.
When we think of the Wild West, we picture cowboys and Texan deserts. But from Washington’s perspective, perhaps the last remaining Wild West is Pyongyang. A place where no American warrant can be served, no one extradited, and where the sheriff has no interest in the rule of law.
And Kim Jong Un has little reason to feel vulnerable. His soldiers have fought alongside Russia in Kursk, Moscow is now bound to Pyongyang by a mutual defence treaty, and last year he stood beside Xi and Putin in Beijing. He has arguably never been better placed - sandwiched between these two adversaries of the West - since coming to power.
And so, North Korea will likely see no ramifications from the West, because they’re already so heavily sanctioned. The West has few levers left to pull, and North Korea has little left to lose.
The irony is that America’s only remaining leverage, if any, sits with Russia and China.
Meanwhile, the US is considering lifting sanctions on Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, and is set to meet Xi Jinping at APEC later this month, with discussions also underway regarding a trilateral meeting including Putin. While all eyes are on the midterms tonight, there’s a strange reminder of the limits of American power: Washington can track the largest theft in history, but may need the cooperation of its greatest geopolitical rivals to do anything about it.
IPOs / Publics
Alphabet had its worst day since listing, losing ~$500B of market value, despite Google Cloud revenue doubling to $30.7B. AI capex of $51.4B in Q3 pushed FCF to −$9.1B, search ads missed forecasts & 2027 spending will “increase significantly”. Only Nvidia’s DeepSeek day has wiped more off a US company! (here, here)
Microsoft disclosed Azure revenue for the first time: $33.2B, +48%, with $677B order backlog (+73%). Unlike Alphabet & Meta, it kept FCF positive at $18.6B. OpenAI was ~11% of revenue ($10B) (here, here)
Amazon’s AWS grew 39% to $46B, but $77.3B of quarterly capex spooked investors – trailing FCF is −$42.4B & shares fell ~7% after hours. Amazon also signed a new AWS–OpenAI deal (here)
Amazon removed product names from order emails, apparently to block AI shopping agents. Receipts now say “Beauty item”. It’s framed as privacy, but it stops Google’s & others’ AI assistants reading what you buy & getting between Amazon & its customers (here)
Oracle capped new borrowing at $20B to 2030 & its shares rallied 11%. It targets $30B+ FCF by FY2029 & will rent out Google’s AI chips (TPUs) in its cloud from 2027 (here)
Hong Kong’s IPO boom is showing strain: proceeds hit a record HK$388B (+106% YoY) in 9mo, but 30 of 121 new listings trade below their IPO price & big tech lock-ups are about to expire (here)
ServiceNow fell 27% on Thursday, its worst day ever, on fears AI will eat software, & is down ~32% since results. Revenue grew 20%+ to $4.1B & AI contract value rose 65%, but a narrow earnings miss was enough to revive the “SaaSpocalypse” trade – the same day it announced a bigger OpenAI partnership (here, here)
Big Dogs
OpenAI cut its fundraising target from $30B to $20B after securing only ~$11B at $1.25T so far, down from the $1.4T valuation it sought. It is now reportedly seeking the remaining ~$9B from family offices & wealthy individuals (here)
OpenAI set up an election “war room” for the US midterms, with hundreds of staff monitoring misuse in real time after Russian & Iranian influence campaigns (here)
OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings is buying home-security firm ADT for $15.3B in cash, at a 45.6% premium & financed by Apollo – the biggest bet yet on buying old-economy companies & rebuilding them around AI (here)
Anthropic bought Mithril Medicine, a one-person biotech that used Claude to run a drug programme, coordinating 11 external labs & taking a muscular dystrophy treatment to mouse studies in under 18 mo (here)
An Anthropic IPO at $2T could create ~1,000 employees worth $100M+ – roughly 1 in 12 of all Americans with that much wealth, or 1 in 7 including OpenAI staff (here)
Venture Capital
Disruptive closed a $10B fund to put ~$1B each into ~10 late-stage AI, defence & software companies. The 30-person Dallas firm (ElevenLabs, Databricks) reports returning $6B+ on ~$1.9B invested (here)
Lightspeed raised $750M+ to buy companies & rebuild them with AI, the latest VC move into private-equity-style “AI roll-ups” (here)
Stockholm’s Creandum closed its largest fund yet, €668M (~$750M), to back ~30 startups from pre-seed to Series A, half for new deals & half for follow-ons. The early backer of Spotify, Lovable & Black Forest Labs is staying generalist rather than AI-only & expanding in San Francisco – up from a €500M fund in 2024 (here, here)
Ballistic Ventures, a five-year-old San Francisco venture firm focused exclusively on cybersecurity, is seeking up to $360M for Ballistic Ventures III (here)
Regulation
The US DOJ is probing Nvidia’s $12.9B purchase of Hugging Face, the main site where AI models are shared, over whether owning it gives Nvidia too much control over how models reach users (here)
Foreign defence contractors winning UK deals over £50M must now invest the same amount in the UK, from April 2027. The first test is likely the ~£1.5B Skynet 6 military satellite contest between Airbus & Lockheed (here)
Venture Geopolitics
The FBI named North Korea as behind a record $6.3B Binance hack, 4x the previous record (Bybit, $1.5B, 2025). Trump: “if it is [North Korea] we’ll talk to North Korea about it”. Beijing is “not aware of the situation”. Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister, called the FBI’s finding a “grave political provocation”. Binance is covering losses & reopened withdrawals on 1 Nov. The company said the attackers set up fake job interviews to trick a software engineer into installing malicious code, as it laid out findings from an investigation into the heist (here, here, here, here, here)
UK Autumn Budget – what matters for tech:
Founders get a new 10% capital gains tax rate on up to £10M of lifetime gains from April 2027, but the rules (25% founding stake, <£10M turnover, <15 staff) exclude many VC-backed founders. The existing relief for everyone else (BADR) is halved to £500K. Consultation closes 30 Nov (here, here)
The British Business Bank gets £5B more, incl. £1.4B for VC funds & £450M of venture debt (here)
£40M for a unit tackling rogue AI agents & a £60M “National Cyber Shield” bought from UK cyber firms (here)
Data centres get priority grid access if they pass 5 tests (incl. national security), towards 6GW of AI capacity by 2030 (from ~2GW). Sites may build their own power “in exceptional cases” – data centres have requested 73GW of grid connections vs UK peak demand of ~45GW (here)
Defence rises to 3% of GDP by 2030, with up to £5B from state investment funds for defence & dual-use tech & £10B more for Ukraine (mostly economic support; £500M of new military aid) (here)
Canada is taking a stake in Cohere as middle powers build their own AI champions. Canada’s leading AI lab is raising up to ~$5B at ~$25.5B (C$35.7B), led by Lidl owner Schwarz Group, with Ottawa investing up to C$1.6B on condition Cohere keeps its HQ, 1,000+ jobs & compute in Canada. Cohere is also absorbing Germany’s Aleph Alpha. The same week, Korea backed chipmaker FuriosaAI & the UK reportedly backed Fractile (here, here)
Canada & the EU signed an “Alliance for the Future”, covering a digital trade deal, Canadian access to Europe’s supercomputers & satellite programmes (Galileo, IRIS²), EU investment in Canadian critical minerals & a study of a new transatlantic data cable. Carney floated Canada becoming the EU’s first “associate member” (here)
US intelligence reportedly believes a Chinese spy cultivated a close relationship with Jensen Huang to pass information to Beijing. Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore’s Megaspeed, reportedly bought up to $4.8B of Nvidia chips for SE Asian data centres serving Chinese clients. Trump was briefed a year ago & didn’t act, wary of hurting chip sales. Nvidia & Beijing deny it (here, here)
Today’s US midterms could threaten Gulf AI chip deals, with Democrats questioning export approvals for the UAE’s G42 & Saudi Arabia’s Humain, & a $500M Emirati investment in Trump-linked World Liberty Financial (here)
Finland’s president & Norway’s PM called Putin as Europe tries to get a seat at peace talks. Denmark & Sweden objected to the lack of EU coordination, but Finland’s Stubb, a golf partner of Trump’s, is emerging as Europe’s likely negotiator (here)
Ukraine & Russia agreed their longest local ceasefire since 2022 to evacuate Oleshky, “brokered by Melania Trump” (here)
The US is considering lifting sanctions on Russia’s sovereign wealth fund as part of a diesel deal – critics say Moscow gets relief with no concessions on Ukraine (here)
US to mediate Ukraine–Russia talks in Abu Dhabi on 10–11 Nov – Witkoff says the working-level talks cover security, de-escalation & humanitarian steps. US negotiators will first meet France, Germany, the UK, the EU & NATO in Brussels on guarantees & reconstruction funding. Zelensky was in Berlin with Merz today (here, here)
Strategic Sectors
AI
Mistral released its biggest model free to download, pitched as AI that “can’t be cut off”. Large 4 is ranked the best open model outside China, though still behind DeepSeek & GLM (here, here)
Goldman Sachs barred its traders & bankers from using AI coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code & Microsoft’s GitHub, limiting them to engineers citing “productivity & risk management” – a reversal from July. Traders had been using them to monitor client flows & produce research & charts (here, here)
Notable deals:
Fractile raised ~£577M, the UK’s biggest-ever chip startup round, with the UK’s Sovereign AI fund reportedly in & an initial ~$250M deal to supply Anthropic (here)
Marvell agrees to buy Lumentum for $115B in all-stock deal. Nvidia put $2B into each company in March & Bloomberg reports Huang blessed the deal. Closing expected H128. It is one of the largest tech deals ever & a bet on optics as the bottleneck in AI networking (here)
Cybersecurity
Google is giving its new hacking-capable AI model to cyber defenders first. Gemini 4 Carbon is the best yet at finding & fixing software flaws, so vetted security teams get access before anyone else (here)
A cyberattack took Belgium’s tax authority offline, pushing the filing deadline to 16 Nov. There’s no attribution yet (here)
Hackers turned up supermarket freezers to as high as 50°C across 6 European countries on Monday, spoiling food in Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, Estonia & the Netherlands. ~40 Delhaize, 15 Carrefour & 13 SuperValu stores were hit via remotely-monitored refrigeration systems, mirroring an attack on French stores last month (here, here)
Defence
The Pentagon has set up a secret office to sabotage rivals’ military tech – the $1.5B+ Technology Support Office uses hacking, supply-chain sabotage & deception (here)
Europe has started funding offensive space capabilities: Astroscale UK won a £15M MoD contract & France’s OSMOS X won EU funding after a Russian satellite shadowed a European one. “Space control” is now an investable category (here)
Putin called Musk a “genius” & said they’re in “close contact”, as Russia builds Rassvet, a 31-satellite Starlink rival (here)
UK defence contracts over £200M take 1,000+ days to sign, says Radakin – slow buying, not lack of capital, is why UK deep-tech startups sell to Ukraine & Germany first (here)
Notable deal:
Energy
The US is lending Constellation $5B to squeeze 1.1GW more from existing nuclear plants, with the power mostly pre-sold to Google, Amazon & Meta for data centres (here)
Crypto
Stablecoin issuers became crypto’s sanctions police: within an hour of the Binance hack, Tether, Circle, Ripple & Trump-linked World Liberty began freezing what became ~$3B of stolen funds. Binance first blamed one engineer’s compromised laptop, but now says there were multiple points of breach & the attack “was not carried out by one person” (here, here)
Notable deal:
Prediction market Kalshi raised $1B at $40B, up ~82% in 5 mo, led by Wellington & Sequoia (here)